


Angels in the Sky

by oli36514



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Christmas, F/M, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28131156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oli36514/pseuds/oli36514
Summary: Shepard has never spent a Christmas on solid ground, but he grew up watching vids of beautiful snowy days. December on the human calendar has come around, but it’s not even winter on Thessia.Post-ending, from spacer Shep’s perspective.
Relationships: Male Shepard/Liara T'Soni
Kudos: 4





	Angels in the Sky

As Shepard lies flat on his back, he feels the soft material beneath him shifting, valleys forming underneath his limbs as his arms and legs move side to side with a sense of rhythm that he’d never thought himself capable of outside of the battlefield. In his mind’s eye, he pictures himself forming a beautiful snow angel.

In fact, even with his eyes closed, he can almost see his breath condensing and freezing in the air above him, even feel the dull ache as his lungs are shocked by frost.

He is knocked out of his reverie by the approaching sound of footsteps, soft and not nearly crunchy enough, accompanied by what can only be described as _giggling_. His eyes open suddenly, limbs ceasing their back-and-forth motion, and Shepard curses inwardly as he finds himself staring directly at the sun, which is much too bright for a cozy winter idyll.

Abruptly closing his eyes, he shifts his head a bit – down and to the left – away from the red halo lingering in his vision and toward the encroaching giggling that he could hear morphing into something closer to full blown laughter.

Opening his eyes again, his gaze is now fixed on Liara, clearly struggling to contain herself at the sight of his odd antics. She looks positively radiant in her patterned sundress, the sunlight passing through the thin fabric to give hints at her figure. A hat rounds out her ensemble, complete with oversized brim and a yellow flower tucked into the trim. He nearly groans at the implications of that enormous hat.

Instead, Shepard looks around – careful to avoid the sun this time – still grasping on to his faint hope of seeing white rooftops and snow-coated conifers, but actually finding himself on a somewhat crowded Thessian beach, surrounded by azure waves crashing into beautiful white sand. _A perfect day any other time of the year_ , he thinks. Now fully removed from his daydream, he can feel the uncomfortable warmth of the sun on his mostly bare body, the itchiness of the sand coating his skin.

He actually does groan aloud this time, flicking some of the sand he’d been wallowing in off his chest as Liara, ever the civilized one, lays out a fresh purple beach blanket (a safe distance from the filthy and never-predictable Shepard) before seating herself to the left of her sand-covered human.

“What was that horrible _noise_?” Liara asks in her smooth Armali accent, the familiarity with which her strangely beautiful alien language meets his ears never failing to surprise him.

Shepard rolls onto his side to face her, just far enough away that he can’t inadvertently knock sand onto Liara’s untarnished blanket. Deciding to ignore her question, he asks his own (in barely tolerable Asari) “Does it ever snow here?” He nearly groans again at the sound of his accent, sounding to himself like a strange cross between a gorilla and some exotic sea creature.

She looks out at the sunlight flickering off of the water in the far distance, clearly having to think about it for a moment. _Not a good sign_. “I can remember it snowing a few times when I was very young, but it didn’t stick. Why?”

“Well, Earth’s winter solstice is coming soon,” he explains, struggling to ignore the implications of what she’d just said. Best not to think about the fact that the last time Liara had to wear a scarf on Thessia, his father was probably just a twinkle in Shepard’s grandfather’s eye.

She just looks at him with her brow furrowed, and he knows that he’s completely lost her this time. Shepard, feeling a little proud that he can still keep Liara on her toes, picks himself up and tries to shift his sandy body onto the blanket to hold her close as he explains himself.

Only steps later, she stops him with a devilish smile and a subtle biotic field. “You are _not_ getting sand all over this blanket, or my dress for that matter. You can explain from over there,” she says, pointing back at the odd, Shepard-shaped impression he’d left in the sand.

He sighs in mock exasperation, ignoring her gesture and instead circling around the blanket and dropping down onto a fresh plot of sand, close enough now that the faintest wafts of her perfume – something citrusy and spicy and totally foreign to his palate – can reach him. _A fair compromise_.

Shepard leans back on his forearms, legs halfheartedly resuming their snow angel motion as he tries to think of a good way to explain his admittedly strange behavior today. That might be hard, since he knows that he’s far from fluent in Asari, and the two of them have been trying to avoid the use of those infernal translation VIs since before the Reapers were even defeated.

“You know I grew up in space, right? Shuttling around from place to place. The longest consecutive period of time I’ve spent on Earth was during my trial, before the Reapers hit,” he starts in English, rubbing his hands together in a futile attempt to get the sand off.

She just nods, prompting him to continue. _Probably a stupid question to ask_. They’d seen inside each other’s minds so many times over the years that he could never really be sure what she knew and what she didn’t anymore.

“In some human cultures, we have a holiday near the northern hemisphere of Earth’s winter solstice called Christmas.”

At this, Liara pulls up her omni-tool, sounding “ _Christ-mas_ ” out to herself in accented English as she initiates an extranet search. Even from underneath the brim of her hat, the glare is strong enough that she has to squint to clearly see the images of snow and strange looking humans in red and green outfits now flooding her omni-tool.

He leans over slightly, watching her scroll through a surprising quantity of glowing tree related media, although not glowing with biotic energy the way he’s noticed some Thessian trees do. “Shepard, are these trees on fire?” Liara asks, and he knows that this isn’t the first time she’s felt a bit of concern when confronted with humanity’s cultural oddities.

Declining to comment on that, he leans back on his forearms before waving his hand dismissively, the gesture flicking tiny white crystals onto Liara’s clean blanket. “Anyway, I’ve been watching vids of beautiful white Christmases since I was a kid, but I’ve never actually spent a Christmas planetside before. And it doesn’t snow in Armali. Hell, it isn’t even winter here.”

He spares a glance at the flower tucked into her hat before looking down at his hands. Old memories come to mind as he stares at the white sand stuck to his fingers, almost sparkling in the high-noon sunlight.

A secular winter holiday party during one of his mom’s postings on Arcturus Station, holly and garland clashing terribly with the utilitarian space station’s struts and beams. A thoughtful junior officer (who no doubt drew the short straw in having to organize this event) kindly setting up decorations as all the children play in a penned-in area filled with horrible glittery artificial snow, layered too shallowly to form a not-snow angel without meeting the station’s metal-plated floor.

Shepard pulls himself out of his daydreams once again to find Liara regarding him carefully. Then she looks past him, her gaze flickering down the length of Armali’s famous white-sanded beachfront. Finally, she looks back at her omni-tool, a silent video of some frozen human village still playing on screen, before again meeting Shepard’s eyes. He can practically see the puzzle pieces fitting together in her mind.

“I think I understand now,” she finally says, speaking again in her native Asari. “But why have you been laying there flailing about in the sand for all this time? Did you fall?”

“Oh. That.” Shepard absently scratches behind his ear for a moment, regretting it immediately as a granule inevitably finds its way into his ear canal. “They’re called snow angels.”

He can’t think of a good way to explain himself this time, so instead he stands abruptly and approaches the beach blanket again, ignoring his bondmate’s protests as he reaches out a hand to help her to her feet.

Upon standing, Liara carefully places her hat down onto the still-mostly-clean beach blanket and removes her sundress, stripping down to her maroon-colored bathing suit before taking his hand, apparently no longer caring about his sandiness.

A few steps later, they stand in front of Shepard’s sand angel. Looking at it directly now, he has to force himself not to laugh. His muscular frame had created a strange impression in the ground: perhaps the burliest, broadest depiction of a graceful, heavenly figure he’d ever seen.

Shepard watches her look down at the figure for a moment with a blank expression, no doubt questioning her romantic decisions, so he simply pulls out his omni-tool and shows her an image of a proper snow angel with graceful arcing wings and even proportions for comparison.

Looking back and forth between the image of the beautiful snow angel and the not-so-beautiful reality of the sand angel, Liara bursts out laughing, the sudden, melodious sound abruptly bringing forth long-forgotten memories – he and his mom curled up in blankets, laughing at old Christmas comedies with the stars visible through a porthole to their side – and soon Shepard is laughing along with her.

They laugh even harder as he pulls them both down to the ground, neither of them caring about the sand now coating both of their bodies.

Hours later, with the beach crowd long gone, the tide begins to rise in the moonlight, slowly engulfing the lower portions of the beach and wiping its slate clean for the next visitors. Among the sand castles and sand pits and sand piles to be washed away in this deluge, two figures lie, etched side by side into the surface of the luminous white sand.

The first is a tall, lumpy thing with wings spread wide, while the second is smaller and more gracefully proportioned than its partner. Facing the encroaching sea, they gradually escape their earthly bounds and fly together into the heavens of the night sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Just some silly Christmas fluff that ended up being way different from what I had originally planned on. Also, an excuse to practice writing sensory details. Thanks a lot for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! Please let me know if you see anything I can improve on.


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